Paid By Reviewstream - Reviewstream is Legit

Two hours after sending Reviewstream an email requesting payment, I received my payment of $90.80. Wow, that was fast!




So I can now say that they are definitely legit. I can also say that I'll be able to pay my student loan bill next month. Thank you, ReviewStream, and bless your little hearts.

I'd like to mention that I did this without a legion of referrals. In fact, I have no referrals at all. Nobody has been up-voting my reviews (I don't think I've gotten a single Helpful vote, although I work awfully hard on them). That's right, I wrote 47 reviews (I got paid the bulk rate for 2 of them before wising up). It wasn't easy. They tend to get accepted faster as you write more. I think out of all of the reviews I have written, perhaps 2 have gotten rejected for the full rate, and that was before I learned how to write them in a way that I knew would get them accepted for the full rate. Writing a good review really doesn't take that long once you have practice and you're writing to a template. You can see the reviews I've written by checking my review blog, ShinyReview.

Waiting...

The points I've been waiting for on MyPoints are still pending.

Nothing at all in my Paypal account from DollarSurveys - but I did get tons and tons of spam! I'll be taking my surveys through Points2Shop unless/until I see something from DollarSurveys actually arrive in my Paypal account, since they both run off of the same survey services (and the number of surveys you can take per day through those is limited) and I would like to benefit the most (or at all) from any surveys I take.

The gift card I requested a few days ago from Swagbucks is still pending - I haven't gotten my gift card number yet. They've always delivered in the past, so I'm not really worried about this, and I'm back up to 11 SwagBucks already again - almost 1/4 of the way to my next gift card.

Regarding ReviewStream - I made a formal payment request from them today. I won't state the amount I requested, since I don't want to jynx myself. I wasn't quite sure how to make the formal request - they didn't offer any suggestions or guidelines, so I just emailed them and asked for the money to be sent to my Paypal account. Yeah, I've been busy writing a lot of reviews - I've been sweating bullets lately, since I've had no way to pay my student loan or phone bill.

Still nothing worthwhile from SurveySpot, besides them expecting me to take surveys for free. Is the chance to not get paid for surveys why I signed up for SurveySpot? I think not. I think I can do that pretty much anywhere else on the Internet.

Survey Sites and the MegaList

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Progress, Monday June 22.

Associated Content accepted another article. It's currently processing, and I hope it posts later today.

I redeemed my third Swagbucks prize, another $5.00 Amazon gift card.

MyPoints - I finally have enough points for the $10.00 Bath & Body Works gift card, however, some of those points are still "pending" and I can't order it until they officially post.

Sendearnings - up to $16.93 (cashout is $30.00)

ReviewStream - Writing several reviews a day and up to $18.80 (cashout is $50.00). A dozen more are still pending. You can find links to posted reviews here.

Neobux - up to 50 whole cents!

Points2Shop - 764 points. Not really a 'minimum' cashout, but it's the equiv. of about $7.64 on Amazon. Got my sights set on a $25.00 pair of 'pirate' boots. It's gonna be a while. Some offers I completed last week are still 'pending' but others post almost immediately - I'm hoping this doesn't turn into another GamingLagoon situation.

Survey Spot - As of yet, I have not qualified for any paying reviews.

MyLot- have been signing in and posting every few days, I'm up to $2.54 (that only took, what, 6 months?).

Gaminglagoon - What's that? My pending offers are still pending? Surely, you jest.

I have found a few other places to join but won't be discussing them until I have an idea of how they may pan out.

A relative also emailed me a list of paid survey websites. The list is incredibly long! I don't think I could ever evaluate all of these, although I'm sure some will clearly be garbage the moment I look at them. I plan on leafing through it over the course of this week, however.

I have a lense on Squidoo, predictably called Shiny Little Pennies.

Up To Speed

Sites I Have Hit Payout On, And Have Paid Me:

Associated Content - Another article awaiting review.

Swagbucks - Roughly 10 points away from another gift card.

Sites I Am Close To Payout On, But Have Not Yet Gotten Payment:

MyPoints - I have nearly accumulated enough points to request my first gift card. That only took a few months, eh?


Sites I Am Not Close To Payout On, But Are Good Prospects:

I have not personally cashed out on any of these sites yet, and therefore cannot vouch for them in good faith. You are still welcome to join them if you want, but I won't give them my endorsement yet (so to speak).

Survey Spot - Still haven't qualified for any paid surveys.

NeoBux - Surprisingly, one of the best "get paid to click ads" websites I have encountered. I started out with only 4 ads to click per day, at 1 cent each, but am now up to 6 ads, and one of them counts for a cent and a half (which hardly makes sense, but ok).

SendEarnings - Yep, it's still slow as slow gets. I don't waste much effort on SendEarnings, lately. In any case, NeoBux is looking much more promising.

Points2Shop - The daily surveys are the only real way I get points. Honestly, I don't feel like giving away all of my personal information or signing up for stupid "free trials". That's about 50 points (50 cents' equivalent, I guess) per day, when I qualify at all. So it's going to take me a while. Assuming I only qualify half the time, that's roughly 150 points a week. But I guess it's not bad if you're saving up points for something special.

ReviewStream - I'm not a big fan of ReviewStream for regular reviews, they'll gyp you out of the full review rate and give you the Bulk Rate whenever possible. Nonetheless, I get the sense that it's fairly legit. I have recently submitted several ReviewStream reviews for the full rate, and one has gotten approved so far. You can find links to them here.

Scour - 183 points so far. I don't focus on Scour, but run my searches in it when I remember to.

Sites I Have Looked At But Haven't Really Touched:

Textbroker


Sites I Have Doubts About:

GamingLagoon - My Completed Offers are still pending. Big surprise.

Hits4Pay - Yep, they still want my SSN. A reader recently commented in defense of Hits4Pay's request for a Social Security number. I already understood that this was for tax purposes, but I'm not comfortable giving my SSN out to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. I've been poking around PTC sites for a while and honestly, since I am not an aggressive recruiter, it is highly unlikely that I will be making more than $600.00 from them.

Hits4Pay's BBB report can be found here. It's an A-, actually not a bad report. However, it is ultimately up to individuals whether or not they wish to divulge such information.

...What?

There are some very odd people currently using the MyPoints search engine - I recently screenshotted this gem:



I really cannot think of a logical reason that this would be a Top Search query, anywhere, ever. Does anybody have any ideas, or know something I don't?

Ciao to Ciao

It looks like Ciao.com is shutting down. They say it's 'merging with Bing', but Bing doesn't appear to be a review site. If you've earned any money from Ciao, it's still yours, but they won't be paying out anything new. This makes me terribly sad - I wasn't earning a lot, but I'd paid a bill with some money from Ciao. It was a nice source of a little bit of income.

I don't know if the newly merged Ciao will be paying for reviews. It doesn't mention that they will, so I'm guessing probably not. I suppose one shouldn't jump to conclusions, but I don't see any reassurances in the letter that it will be otherwise.

My personal opinion is this: from what I've seen on the website, Ciao was probably bleeding money to nonsense reviewers, plagiarists, and users who did not contribute any sort of unique or worthwhile content. This is my own speculation, it is not a fact, but I cannot help thinking this. The plagiarism and garbage reviews were rampant, and I can't see how Ciao would be able to sustain itself when much of its content was either copied or nonsense.

Ciao isn't the only paid review site out there, though. There is an alternative, a website I didn't like as much because I don't like the interface, so I never used it much - it's called ReviewStream. The payment system is a bit different - $2 for review, unless you let them give you the bulk rate, and $.10 per rating. You can't really log in - you submit reviews with your email address, and your account balance is tied to it - so it's not as socially gratifying. You also have to wait for your submitted reviews to be approved, and the minimum cashout is higher at $50.

If you have reviews on Ciao, do what it says and save them. I'm going to find out if they can be "recycled" or if Ciao will be keeping them up. It looks like I'll be hopping over to ReviewStream now.

So I guess, to Ciao... "ciao".

Progress

Alrighty.

So far, I am up to 157 points in Scour. Still a few thousand to go, but getting points is easier than I thought it would be. I was using the Scour engine to run phrases through (checking for plagiarism on Ciao) but realized that when they reviewed my account for payout, it might look suspicious to them. So I stopped doing that (Scour wasn't pulling up much in that area that was useful for me, anyway).

I am around 100 points away from cashing out on MyPoints. I was frustrated with MyPoints - I get disqualified for every single one of their surveys, and accumulating points has been very, VERY slow. However, they recently introduced something called the "Frogpond", where you can visit and write short reviews about websites to get points. 25 points per website! And on MyPoints, that's a pretty good amount of points. I don't get anything for referring you (their referral system works off of email only) but now that points are easier to get on MyPoints, it may be more worthwhile to look into it.

I have also joined SurveySpot. I have been taking free surveys - not making money yet. I guess before you get a chance at paid surveys, they want to make sure you're trustworthy/serious. That's the impression I get. SurveySpot is a member of the BBB Online Reliability Program, so I trust them right now. They don't use referral links, but if you want to maximize how much you benefit from this and make the most out of joining, your best bet is to find a link to it and join through somewhere like Points2Shop, where you get points for joining.

And as for Points2Shop, accumulating points there isn't as rough as GamingLagoon. Unlike GamingLagoon, they seem to actually approve offers you complete! It's hard for me to find offers - I'm choosy and loathe giving away any of my contact information unless I think a website is trustworthy - but their daily surveys really aren't bad (when you can qualify, anyway, and you won't always qualify). I'm nearly up to 500 points there, which I guess is like 5 bucks on Amazon.com, which really isn't all that bad when you think about it.

EasyHits4U, LinkReferral, and Getting Referrals

I decided the EasyHits4U wasn't worth the revenue I was losing - at least, for this blog. Well, that was short lived! So this blog is no longer participating in that. I still have the account and may use it for other websites (I have friends I'm sure would appreciate the hits). Instead, I will be relying on other ways of bringing in traffic. So, the ads are now back up. I didn't foresee struggling with this as a side-effect of my blog, but there you go! I'm learning about this stuff on the fly.

Now, my assessment from my very short experience:
EasyHits4U seems to be good only if you want a ton of hits with a fairly low conversion rate. Using the website was interesting, so interesting that I may actually continue to use it even though I'm not actually using it to get hits at the moment. I don't have any problems with "hoarding" hits for future use on different websites or blogs. I discovered many interesting websites even in the day that I was using it, but the majority of them were the MAKE 5 BAZILLION DOLLARS IN 2 WEEKS WITH THIS SCAM!!!!!!! types. And frankly, those really irritate and bore me.

If you are less interested in a sheer volume of hits and would rather have a lower volume of targeted traffic (you have to do a little bit more work to get it) you may be more interested in LinkReferral. It's hard to explain how it works, but I'll try. You get added to a directory of links. Your ranking is really, really low - in order to improve it, you have to accrue credit by visiting other websites, rating them, and writing short reviews about them. So you're potentially also helping other webmasters and bloggers improve their websites and blogs, as well as discovering interesting new places on the Internet. You can also make posts in the forum to earn credit. This credit improves your ranking in LinkReferral's directory. I would like to point out that am not currently using LinkReferral for this specific blog because I have ads on this blog and that is against the rules, but a friend showed it to me, and I thought that the concept was interesting. It was also relevant enough to blog about, since so many "get paid to ___" programs rely on referrals to generate any decent amount of money - so, here I am.

Just Joined Two More Sites

...shall we see how they pan out?

I joined EasyHits4U in order to try to get some traffic. Not that many people know about this blog. I think it's a shame since I really do try to be genuinely helpful, and I try to update regularly. If you arrived here via EasyHits4U, please spend a moment to read this blog. Even if you think ppc/paid survey/review for money/get free stuff search engines are a load of crap, I hope that my enthusiasm and wit will make this blog worth reading.
For those interested in EasyHits4U, you can't have Adsense ads up. It's against the program policies! That's why I have taken my ads down for now, until I get a decent flow of traffic. You can actually make money directly off of EasyHits4U, but honestly, it's not going to be a lot even if you sit there and click madly all day long. I like to keep it running in the background and click when I remember to. While some of the sites are just Internet crappy crap, I have actually found some neat sites and fellow bloggers through it.

I have joined Points2Shop. I don't yet know how it will pan out. Unfortunately, it is one of those "COMPLETE FREE OFFERS" sites, which I loathe. Yes, you can play games for points, but the games are limited and you have to spend points in order to compete - no guarantee that you will win more points. Still, it has daily surveys, and you get a point just for logging in every day. That's 365 free points per year (which comes out to about $3.65, so don't get too excited).
The interesting thing about this one is that there's no dinking around with gift cards. You buy things directly from Amazon with your points, and they seem to have a 1 point: 1 US dollar ratio.

And, of course, the well-known Neobux. I've held off on joining because I've heard good and bad things about it. You only get 1 cent per ad you click. On the other hand, clicking ads isn't much work, is it? It's one of those things you can just do for 2 minutes a day. You get about 4 ads. That's, uh, $1.00 a month. Minimum payout - I'm not sure, I think it's 2 bucks. I'll check later. I guess Neobux is another one of those "get referrals to make anything worthwhile" websites.

But I'd have to say that one of the websites with the best payoff-to-effort ratio is still Swagbucks. That's why I have some advice for you:

Scour.com and More about GamingLagoon, Hits4Pay

Hit cashout on Ciao again. My first time, it took a week and a half - this time, it took 3 days. Why? Well, now I have a backlog of 44 reviews. The more reviews you write, the faster you make money, I suppose. I guess I'd better get cracking on those reviews again, eh?

I've also returned to my Scour.com efforts. I dropped it before because of complaints that Scour was not paying people who hit cashout - they were banning people and other shady things instead. However, I have since decided that perhaps this was because people were violating the Terms of Service (I see it constantly on other websites, right?) and unlike certain online counterparts, Scour actually DOES something about this. The only way to find out is to try to hit cashout on Scour myself, and either verify that it's legit or get conveniently banned. We shall see. Either way, it's gonna be a while - I've only got 90 points. If you want to give it a shot in the meantime, I say go for it.

GamingLagoon is on my shitlist. GamingLagoon has been sending me spam mails about their NEW OFFERS, so I signed up for another free "send me spam email" type offer to see if they've gotten any better about denying everything. For those not in the know, GamingLagoon is another free gift card/free stuff/free money type website. You can save up points to get stuff like a Nintendo DS, convert your points to Paypal money, or get gift cards with them. It's not nearly as good as Swagbucks, in my opinion - earning points is super slow, you have to sign up for "offers" (most of which involve too much money, or too much personal information), and they tend to reject the offers you've submitted as completed and refuse to reward you points, even when you have proof. I'll update this blog post with some images later, in order to demonstrate what I'm talking about. Nonetheless, persistent members claim that they have gotten their gift cards and such, I highly suspect that the only REAL way to do this is to recruit aggressively. If you're into that, I guess GamingLagoon can probably work pretty well for you. But I can't recruit people in clear conscience if I know that there's no way for them to be successful on the website without recruiting a whole bunch of people, themselves. I guess it's all about what you are or are not willing to do in order to earn points.

Hits4Pay still wants my social security number, but they're not getting it. I doubt I'll ever make enough off a PTC website to warrant needing my SSN for tax purposes.

Ciao and Swagbucks Cashouts

Currently up to my eyeballs in Message box spam in Ciao. Also angry - discovered some members who had copied my reviews. I reported them - unfortunately, one of the continually frustrating things about Ciao is that they do nothing about the plagiarists.

Otherwise, I am pennies away from the $5 cashout on Ciao after just 2 days of renewed activity. That's not bad, really. I won't be cashing out at $5, however - it's not worth it, at this point. I'll wait until there's more in my account.

On Swagbucks, I just 'bought' another $5 Amazon gift card. My order has been verified, and I am currently waiting for the gift card number.

If you haven't joined these two sites yet, you're definitely missing out!

In the meantime, at MyPoints, I am about 150 points away from ordering my first gift card.

Ciao - Legitimacy Verified

I have written 40-odd reviews on Ciao. A while ago, I requested some payments. Two separate payments, totaling about $23.00, when all is said and done. I was paid via Paypal.

Well, nothing happened for a while - no money in my Paypal account - and I thought perhaps I'd been had. I was also frustrated by the rampant plagiarism and spamming on Ciao. So, at the end of April, I just sort of gave up.

Wasn't I surprised when I was informed that Paypal had a payment waiting for me?



Here, you can only see one of the payments (for $18.00), I'm guessing the other one went through at the end of April (about when I gave up).

Well, the money is in my account - for real - and I can say that, while Ciao certainly takes their sweet time paying you, they DO pay you. Be prepared to wait for a month and a half, however.

I'm back on Ciao again - after all, $23.00 for writing a few reviews isn't bad. There are other websites where you can write reviews for money, but they are not as user friendly and they have some shady tactics. I'll review one in more depth later this week.

Until then,
Ciao!